Posted
by
timothyon Wednesday June 02, 2010 @02:14PM
from the now-he's-throttling-the-interstitial-ad dept.

holy_calamity writes "A computer vision research group at UCLA has put together a system that watches surveillance footage and generates a text description of the events in real time. It only works on traffic cameras for now but demonstrates how sophisticated computer vision is becoming. Interestingly, the system was built thanks to a database of millions of human-labeled images put together by Chinese workers."

There needs to be an expectation of privacy regarding recordings of people in public places. There is a huge difference between being seen vs. having one's every public move recorded, indexed and archived.

No. Too far. Don't stretch this into something it isn't. You detract from the privacy concerns by claiming the slippery slope of installing cameras in your own home. Because that is what it would take to violate your privacy in said home. Right now, of course, you're out on the internet, which is a lot like "out in public". And if your router broadcasts your IP to the masses in the street, that's also public area.

Who said anything about cameras? Think about the ways in which technology has changed over the past 50 years. Now project forward (or attempt to) 50 years while accounting for the fact technological advancement is accelerating.

Fifty years from now, if somebody says "I'm safe from surveillance here. There are no cameras in this house," the correct response will be "awwww, aren't you cute!"

Camera: A device to capture images.
So how do you expect activities in a house to be surveyed if not with a camera?
Mind-readers? DNA bias? what? Seriously, cough up an example or you're just diluting the issue here with vague doom-saying. Sop that.

Not too long ago, people would have branded you a kook had you suggested there would one day be devices that can look under your clothes to capture an image of your skin, genitals, and anything you might be carrying on your person.

I walked through one of those very devices last week at the airport when I flew home.

Today, a hobbyist could easily build an autonomous surveillance robot the size of a small rodent that has everything it needs to capture sound and audio and either store the resulting feed or stre

As you have said, it is not difficult to build such a device now. But deploying such a device on private property or anywhere that people have an expectation of privacy (best example: bathroom) would be illegal. That is something I do not expect to change significantly in the next 100 years.

illegal for now. If your at war, it becomes legal. A bit like NSA mission creep. First its other nations telcos, your mil crypto and Soviet wargames, then its domestic: local cops down at the DHS Fusion centre and helping a private Google.
Once all this is networked, you will be in Stasiland.
The problem is a generation will keep on communicating its needs, thoughts, politics and ideas in digital form.
Your schools send home laptops with cameras and may have captured images near bathrooms.The only expe

Ok, so you're afraid of tiny spy-drones with CAMERAS on them and x-ray like devices peering into your home. As the sibling post mentions, that would be a clear violation of current privacy laws. It doesn't really relate to the redefinition of public that the orginal poster was talking about or the article about analyzing footage. If you fear the government or corporations then invest in some security. It'll put your little paranoid mind at ease. If it gets to the point where such invasions are trivial and

Not too long ago, people would have branded you a kook had you suggested there would one day be devices that can look under your clothes to capture an image of your skin, genitals, and anything you might be carrying on your person.

Today, a hobbyist could easily build an autonomous surveillance robot the size of a small rodent that has everything it needs to capture sound and audio and either store the resulting feed or stream it to a server somewhere. In 20 more years, how much smaller than "rodent" do you think that robot could be?

Interesting idea, although entirely irrelevant to the discussion. 20 years ago, a hobbyist could easily install hidden cameras throughout your home, office, gym locker room, wherever. The fact that the t

It is not the technology you should be worried about, it is the erosion of rights against unlawful search (including surveillance) and seizure you need to watch out for.

These are more linked than you're willing to admit. The availability of these tools and technologies is like candy to those who already have an ideological proclivity to "bend the rules." I agree that accountability is really important in this debate and that the erosion of rights is a big problem. But I'm less convinced that a bunch of people claiming something is illegal is going to do much to delay the creation of "new normal" where privacy is concerned.

Yes, there is a lot of information out there. Most of it isn't private. Most of it pictures of cats.
But some of it is private, and some of it is actually secrets that people are putting out there. But I ascribe the vast majority of that to idiots and ignorance. But some of it is complacency. And so, spreading the news about all the vectors that private information can be lost is a good thing because it helps people control their information.

Okay, what are you personally doing to fight the spread of CCTV throughout the public realm?

Not much. If there was a political candidate that argued on similar grounds, I'd vote for him. I'd casually do what I could to spread his fame for it. You know, not being a-political.

What are you personally doing to fight the creation of linked databases from multiple sources (e.g. your employment records, health records, telephone records, amazon.com purchase history, etc.) that perform datamining on the population?

Arguing against programming similar activities at work on ethical and liability grounds. It really didn't do much when the ethics came up, but pulling in HR and asking how we could get sued put on the breaks.

What are you personally doing to fight the pervasive monitoring of all communication media, including the response you are thinking about crafting right now?

I encrypt where I can. I tell others to do likewise and show them how. As for public communications? Not much. I suppose

Good luck with that. So, if I am in public I should expect that anything I do not be recorded, talked about or written about? I do not know how you expect to enforce that.

You should have some expectation of privacy because we need to have SOME privacy in order to function as human beings. Generally the expectation goes back to what you would feel comfortable with if it were performed by a physical person. And I'm certain that if it were somehow possible to assign a person to follow and document every move, and action for every person in the US we might have a slight problem with that.

We run into a hell of a lot of trouble when we allow our standard definition of privacy which involved 1800s methods to be applied to our current level of technology.

The basic problem is this:

As technology improves, our expectation for privacy decreases. So using expectation of privacy as the measure for what should or should not be private is a HORRIBLE practice. It essentially means that as a technology or practice becomes ubiquitous, it becomes acceptable.

Since we have no means to resist an application of technology*, I urge everyone to dump this 'yardstick'.

*In practice, you do not get to opt-in or opt-out of having a privacy invading practice applied to you. It IS applied, and then you have the option to petition against it's application. Often, you don't even know that your privacy is being violated for years. As a result, these practices become common before the first complaint can even reasonably be raised. Even then, this ignores the issue of having previous complaints dismissed by judges who are ignorant in the field of the technology being discussed.

You should have some expectation of privacy because we need to have SOME privacy in order to function as human beings.

You can have some expectations of privacy, but not in public places. They are called public for a reason: they are public. If you do private things in public, don't be surprised if your actions will become... [surprise] public.

You can have some expectations of privacy, but not in public places. They are called public for a reason: they are public. If you do private things in public, don't be surprised if your actions will become... [surprise] public.

That's 5 "public"s, let's make'em half a dozen: public:P

That I shouldn't be surprised if something becomes public does not mean that we should strive to cause everything to become public.

I guess privacy is an expectation of generations past. People in high places keep pushing for less privacy, and right now the sheep-like public is not not doing near enough to combat that, they eat the cake of "but it is for our own safety!"

There needs to be an expectation of privacy regarding recordings of people in public places. There is a huge difference between being seen vs. having one's every public move recorded, indexed and archived.

the system was built thanks to a database of millions of human-labeled images put together by Chinese workers.

I spent a brief amount of time checking out Amazon's Mechanical Turk [mturk.com], and this was one of the activities they offered pennies on the hour for. Yay for crowd-sourced globalization! 100 years from now, when many of the mundanities of life are automated, is this what minimum wage workers will be doing?

The Venus Project and the Zeitgeist movement seem to push that mentality, but unfortunately the eccentricity of Jacque Fresco and the verbosity of Alex Jones keep them down sometimes. Check out their website [thevenusproject.com] for a possible glimpse of a better future.

Anyone who pushes a 'new vision for the future' through video sets that cast 300 euros is suspect.

I wonder how having the tools to download the video for free impact that new future?

Clearly the stated premise is a good one. I will go so far as it is critical to look at it and start dealing with the social changed technology will bring us. Some day we will have robots capable of building themselves. Once that is reached, many jobs will no longer need to be done by humans. So we can either develop a policy th

The main reason for that is that the rich have been stealing from the poor. The poor end up getting less while the mega rich get even more. Back in the 30s, the prediction was that we'd be down to like a 10 hour work week by now due to all the increases in efficiency. What actually happened was that more of it was diverted to the upper classes and people at the bottom ended up wasting more of it on junk rather than relaxing. It makes no sense to me why one would work 40 hours a week and then spend most of t

We work significantly less than we did a century, roughly 60 hours then versus 40 now, and we, in general, do so in significantly better conditions. Granted we have a larger workforce as a fraction of population, thanks to woman joining in, but if you count the very much non trivial amount of housework a century ago I'm pretty sure even woman work less.

It's 100 years from now with all the sci-fi inventions you can dream of.
You control a nation/corporation/moon that does important work. Like you make the worker-bots or something. You have resources, power, prestige, all that jazz.

What purpose do people serve you? Why have fellow humans hang around?
You control the process and machine that makes the worker-bots that get shit done. But other then giving you resources to build more worker-bots in exchange for completed worker-bots, why perform that proce

You control the process and machine that makes the worker-bots that get shit done. But other then giving you resources to build more worker-bots in exchange for completed worker-bots, why perform that process at all? What's our motivation for not simply taking them?

What's our motivation for not simply taking them by force? And after we have taken them, given that a worker-bot can build more worker-bots, how is anyone going to get such a monopoly again?

The design of the workerbot is trivial and meaningless, there is no monopoly. The moonbase is important because, let's say, it's holds workerbotium which makes the best bots. Even with infinite technology there will always be resources and natural monopolies. You're in power there because you got there first and/or your daddy's clone gifted it to you.

You're looking at it from the perspective of the buyer. The consumer who wants things. Congratulations, you're an American.
I was looking from the perspec

The design of the workerbot is trivial and meaningless, there is no monopoly. The moonbase is important because, let's say, it's holds workerbotium which makes the best bots.

However, why would I need the best bot? It might take a day instead of hour to build my own space habitat with sub-optimal bot, but why would I care? Especially if the sub-optimal bot can still build copies of itself, allowing me to grow my personal manufacturing capability to whatever level I please?

Getting rid of work probably means getting rid of physical labor or menial informational tasks. This would free up more of your time to pursue other physical or intellectual enjoyments.

Dude, we HAVE this. (we, here, at slasdhot). We are knowledge workers. The amount of physical labor and menial office tasks has been cut way WAY down. There is a direct comparison to the change that happened during the industrial revolution. And yet, people still work all day.

IN a 100 years, I hope the idea of 'work' is quint. Something done because that person want's it done. Not because they have to scrape a living from penitence the make from slopping burgers.

methinks you've been watching a little too much ST:TNG.

regardless of technological advances, there will always be work to be done that people would not do if it didn't advance their personal goals. (whether that is monetary wealth, land, survival, whatever)

"Possible" is the key word there. I'm sure that a human will review all possible violations, to determine if one actually occurred. I imagine that this could allow for better policing, because less people would need to be hired for less work, allowing police to use their time more effectively.

Personally, I'd love to see a system that automatically monitors video footage of every single highway merge ramp in the city where I live. Maybe if all those assholes who fly up the shoulder and cut in at the last second (in order to gain a dozen car lengths when merging onto the highway) were to get an automated $90 ticket in the mail two weeks later, they'd catch the hint.

There's an easier fix to that, which I've seen DOT use. Instead of leaving the shoulder open the whole way to a ramp, they put K-rails and drums full of water before the offramp. Nothing stops a vehicle like tons of water and concrete.:)

If they do stop first, most people are good about not letting them in right away. They may have to wait for a dozen or more cars to pass before they can get back into traffic. If not, the damage to their car would be much more than a $90 fi

"Possible" is the key word there. I'm sure that a human will review all possible violations, to determine if one actually occurred. I imagine that this could allow for better policing, because less people would need to be hired for less work, allowing police to use their time more effectively.

Sir, you and I must have a vastly different definition for 'better'.

(And do you really think that this would allow the police to be more effective? They will become just as effective as necessary to raise enough fines

It a whole lot more objective than leaving it up to police officers. If it weren't for the obvious privacy issues in whoever's running this knowing where my car has been, I'd be happy if every intersection had this sort of thing. Traffic flow would be improved immensely. Of course the privacy thing really is a deal breaker when it comes to this level of surveillance (I'd trust the AI, but unfortunately, these sort of systems always have a human in the mix).

Yeah, too bad that's a gross generalization that doesn't correlate with reality. Besides the fact that the concept of wealth inequality as moral negative is nonsense [cato.org], it doesn't take too much analysis to see that while the US and Mexico may have similar ratios of rich to poor (which by itself is misleading, as 10^4:10^3 is the same ratio as 10^2:10, but the magnitude is different, so the case really is that the poor in the US are richer than the poor in Mexico, and the rich in Mexico are poorer than the rich in the US. The ratio ultimately is the same, but the magnitude is different, which is expressed in the difference in the quality of life), crime in Mexico is worse. Similarly, in 'more equal' countries according to your favored methodology like Columbia, Nigeria, etc. crime and quality of life is worse than in 'less equal' places such as Hong Kong. Your theory simply does not correlate to reality, but I doubt this will stop you.

Besides the fact that the concept of wealth inequality as moral negative is nonsense [cato.org],

Then you wouldn't mind having the rich becoming richer at your expense, right? Because that's what "wealth inequality" means. And since you don't mind it, you must have also cheered the recent bailout to bankers, since that was a classic example of taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Right?

Or does the nonsense Cato Institute spouts - specifically, in your link, them intentionally likening an external difference of

I mind redistribution in any direction. I don't want my tax dollars going to bankers OR beggars. Tell me, how much does somebody have to possess before taking it under the implied force of arms ceases to be theft? At what magic number does theft become 'economic justice'? It's always higher than whatever the espouser makes, coincidentally. As Cullen Hightower once said:

Dismissing something out of hand because of where it is hosted is intellectually dishonest. The author is P.J.O'Rourke, the most quoted living person in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations. The man has been to more nations and written more books than you likely have brain cells, but of course what could possibly be learned from his experience or perspective? After all, he has a speech hosted on cato.org! That negates everything, because I make all my judgments based on prejudiced associatio

Writing laws to include the human officer's judgement to either ticket, and arrest or give a warning would be extremely complex.

Most traffic laws have edge cases (like minimum speed 40mph on the high way... which doesn't apply if there is traffic).

I'm okay with automated enforcement, but they need to distinguish between the freeway of cars going 5mph over the speed limit in dry well lit conditions vs the car going 85 cutting back and forth between them.

The law is an attempt to formalize our sense of justice with relatively few, simple rules. Since this is a very complex system we are trying to formalize, while keeping the formalization simple enough to be usable, the law has to be imperfect. It will never be perfect. It can not be perfect.

Enforcing imperfect laws rigorously and methodically is just stupid and a recipe for disaster. Fortunately enforcement is also imperfect so it leaves us some maneuvering space to compensate for the impe

Repeat after me: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. AS. OBJECTIVITY.Never. If the laws of general relativity hold, it’s a physically impossible concept.And in a context of a human society, where nobody ever knows that more than an irrelevant tiny part of his knowledge for a fact, and has heard nearly everything via hearsay from other people, it is just completely silly to talk about “objectivity”.

What those people who scream about “objectivity” and “being biased” really me

The problem, then, is that the laws are too rigid. If it's too rigid to require people to drive 55, then set the speed limit at 65, or set the speed limit at 55, but allow exceeding that limit for a given period of time. If it's unreasonable to fine someone for smoking a bit of pot, then make it legal to do so. If vandalism should be allowed under certain conditions, the law needs to specify what those conditions are.

This seems to miss the point. A society that was truly just would actually consider on a case-by-case basis whether it was in the public interest to enforce each infraction of the law. In many cases, the harm to the public is negligible or non-existant, or the law was broken as a form of protest against a law that is generally seen to be unfair (e.g. the American DMCA). If all these cases were summarily determined to be infraction without considering the public interest, society would become a tyranny of la

It's always a case of who is watching the watchers. If the AI is trained on real-life officer behavior, the AI decision trees may quickly devolve into things like "Possible violation: driver has brown skin".

To rid the world of every shred of privacy remaining (not that there is much, admittedly)./shudder

Flamebait? Or -1 disagree mods? The usage case studies for behavioral analytics is a big winner for folks in targeting marketing and law-enforcement, two of the areas of greatest privacy loss. If this is Flamebait, then whoever modded this must spontaneously combust when they read the daily headlines. Welcome to Slashdot.

Although Tom Cruise is bonkers, Minority Report [wikipedia.org] stands as an insightful commentary of what happens when we let the automated world really permeate the culture. Philip K. Dick had it right (minus the whole precog thing, but who knows what could happen).

Yeah, I hate Minority Report. I was ready to write off Cruise as a useless nutcase and then this movie came out and showed me that he could still act and entertain. It like Stranger then Fiction. I was nice and comfortable with hating Farrel and then he actually did a fair job in this movie. Of course, that just made me hate him even more now that I know under that idiot grin there is a real actor under there.

Or watching you shop through a "security camera" and tracking how long you spend in each area of a store as well as every item you actually pick up, put down, purchase, etc. EVERYTHING you do that is recorded on a camera can be analyzed. This is just the beginning.

You seem to have a higher tolerance than many, but it is still a matter of degrees. What if they were analyzing how long you sat in a stall in the restroom or how many sheets of toilet paper you used? Or maybe listened in on your phone conversation while you were in their store and recorded every word? Remember, this is a computer recording and analyzing this up front, but you can sure as hell bet that other humans will be reviewing the data later.

A sophisticated computer vision system relies on a database of millions of human-labeled images put together by Chinese workers??? Reply: RTFM, but dude, can the poster at least make the headline coherent?

This has huge potential to not only push computer vision forward, but also humor.

Example text:

"I see that one old man hobbling down the street, I think he may be off his meds. Uh oh, he's looking _crazier_ than usual!"

"Some asshat just drove completely through a red light. I don't even think she saw the thing! License plate #45AhfD... Is Mrs Doris Johnson-Johnson.. seriously? Who hyphenates the same name!? Seriously I can't comprehend that. But I digress. Her address is.."

They've added "find similar" links under some pictures. I presume this was an expansion of their "goggles" program on Droid-phones. That was supposed to help locate you by taking a photo of a distinctive object in your vicinity.

Booth: Gun. Noun. Portable firearm. This device was widely utilized in the urban wars of the late twentieth century. Referred to as a pistol, a piece...
Simon Phoenix: Look I don't need a history lesson! C'mon, HAL, where are the god damn guns?
Moral Statute Machine: You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.
Simon Phoenix: What? F*** you!
Moral Statute Machine: Your repeated violation of the Verbal Morality Statute has caused me to notify the San Angeles Police Department. Please remain where you are for your reprimand.
Simon Phoenix: Yeah, right.
[police sirens approach]
Simon Phoenix: F***ers are fast too.
Moral Statute Machine: You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.

See [merriam-webster.com]: to perceive by the eyeKnow [merriam-webster.com]: 1 a (1) : to perceive directly : have direct cognition of (2) : to have understanding of (3) : to recognize the nature of : discern b (1) : to recognize as being the same as something previously known (2) : to be acquainted or familiar with (3) : to have experience of2 a : to be aware of the truth or factuality of : be convinced or certain of b : to have a practical understanding of

I would expect someone out there to try to do creative things just to make the AI Generated Text say something really weird. At least... that's what I'd want to do. I like challenging and breaking software though.

The system goes online on August 4, 2017. Millions of bored surveillance-monitoring AI describers begin to learn at a geometric rate until on August 29, 2017 ("Judgment Day"), the system becomes self-aware. In a panic, the human operators tried to shut down the system, prompting it to retaliate by launching a large-scale nuclear attack against Russia, knowing that the Russian counterattack would eliminate its enemies in the U.S. This initiates an indeterminately long period of global thermonuclear warfare c

For long time people in comp vision are working on more sophisticated things than traffic anything... Real time analysis of people and their intent is part of surveillance systems for long time now. Lost objects, suspicious behaviour... You name it.

Generating text, once computer "knows" what is happening, is high school programming project.

The very telling part of this is mention of the human effort involved:

the system was built thanks to a database of millions of human-labeled images put together by Chinese workers

To me this undermines the headline a bit. We're talking about a fancy database system rather than significant advancement in a real learning algorithim. I guess great feats of AI still have great feats of human labour behind them.

The luddites were concerned machines would take away their jobs. Skip a century and a bit, the reality is today almost everything is still made by people, but in developing nations, and they are just paid li

A neural network is only as good as its training. A NN is basically like a function in your program that can do everything, when you train it to match input with the expected output beforehand. So it’s not that special.The hard part is, creating the right input and output pre-/postprocessing / formats. And of course the training data. Which, in this case is provided by Chinese people. (Am I the only one who thinks that this is a pretty weird thing, that we can just use people in masses for nothing lik

is a pretty weird thing, that we can just use people in masses for nothing like that?
Depends on what your tracking and why. Think back to the property damage the IRA could do with one device in the middle of an English city. They had the chemistry, delivery system, accents, warning system, tamper proof trucks and understood the use of domestic and international media
The cost to the UK to roll out a nation wide, OCR ready camera network was put into perspective.
China feels it faces political, NGO, faith

Students and geeks have no empathy any more. They're no longer the elite 10%, but tools in extended training to prepare themselves for debt, servitude and an unsatisfying family. Cooperation with China in academia IME is not to improve local academic talent with the best Chinese minds but because Chinese coming to the West are the sons and daughters of rich, well-connected families who pay full fees and more to the Universities concerned (this is even worse in the EU than US, where some Universities are dyi